Resumen de Implicit Attitudes to Work and Leisure Among North American and Irish Individuals: A Preliminary Study

Gail Chan, Dermot Barnes-Holmes, Yvonne Barnes-Holmes, Ian Stewart

• The current article reports the findings from two preliminary experiments investigating the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Implicit Relational Association Procedure (IRAP) as measures of implicit attitudes in the domain of work and leisure among North American and Irish individuals. The IAT and IRAP tasks involved responding under time pressure on a computerized task, with response latency as the dependent variable. The IAT required participants to categorize positively or negatively valenced words with stimuli associated with either Work or Holidays. The IRAP required that participants confirm or deny that Work and Holidays are similar or opposite to positively and negatively valenced words. Participants also completed an explicit measure consisting of a Likert-based questionnaire. In both Experiments, citizens of the United States of America produced performances on the IAT and IRAP that indicated more negative attitudes to work and more positive attitudes to holidays than both Canadian and Irish citizens. Responses on the explicit measures did not accord with this overall pattern of group differences. The results support the use of the IRAP as a measure of implicit attitudes and furthermore the findings appear to be generally consistent with a recent large-scale survey of attitudes to work across 23 countries.